A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “consciousness”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander attends the Effective Altruism Global 2017 conference, describing both the practical charity work and bizarre philosophical speculations of the movement, ultimately admiring their genuine commitment to doing good.
Scott explores the implications of Sean Carroll's argument against the simulation hypothesis, suggesting that our inability to explain consciousness might indicate we're in a 'ground-level' simulation.
Scott Alexander reimagines the biblical story of Job as a philosophical dialogue about the existence of evil and suffering in God's creation.
Scott explores a dystopian future scenario of hyper-optimized economic productivity, speculating on the emergence of new patterns and forms of life from this 'economic soup'.
Scott Alexander argues that rationality should be viewed as habit cultivation rather than a limited resource, drawing parallels with aikido and lucid dreaming techniques.
Scott Alexander discusses how the clarity experienced when awakening from meditation-induced delusions mirrors his appreciation for simplifying philosophical concepts.
Scott Alexander uses a king-and-viziers analogy to argue that people can be inherently good even when their actions seem selfish, and explores the nature of evil and human goodness.
Scott Alexander explores subjective temporal granularity, its relation to meditation, and how it might allow for intervening in thought construction.
Scott explains Robert Trivers' evolutionary theory that consciousness evolved as a 'public relations agency' to help people deceive others by first deceiving themselves about their true motives.
Scott presents Skinner's definition of voluntary behavior as that which is transparent to reinforcement, then extends this framework to explain the perceived unity of consciousness and the feeling of a core 'self'.
Scott uses a thought experiment about a robot that shoots blue things to argue that we mistakenly interpret simple programmed behaviors as goal-directed utility maximization, when really the robot is just executing code, not minimizing blue.
Scott expands on Wei Dai's master-slave model of the mind to explain akrasia and self-deception, proposing that the unconscious (U) uses the conscious mind (C) as a PR agency to signal socially admirable values while pursuing selfish goals, requiring just enough genuine support of C's principles to maintain credibility both to others and to C itself.
Scott presents an anthropic argument suggesting animals might lack subjective experience, based on the observation that if animals were conscious, we would statistically be much more likely to be animals than humans.
Scott recounts the case of Simon Browne, an 18th-century preacher who claimed to have lost his soul and consciousness after killing a robber in self-defense, yet continued to write and reason brilliantly, potentially representing a real-world philosophical zombie.